Urban and rural acute-care hospitals are closing at the same rate despite widespread belief that rural providers face more financial pressure than urban ones. That’s according to recent findings from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published as a research letter in healthcare journal JAMA. Nationally, more acute-care hospitals across the U.S. closed than opened between 2010 to 2025, the study found. “Many policymakers have been treating hospital closures as a rural problem, but our data show it’s a national problem,” Thomas Tsai, associate professor of health policy and management and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “We must shift away from only asking ourselves how we can save rural hospitals, and start asking: How do we protect access to hospital care for vulnerable communities, wherever they are?”
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